Climate Modelers Gone Wild

The case for global warming alarmism depends on models that attempt to simulate a dynamic climate with mathematical formulas plugged into super-computers. According to the best of these models, increased atmospheric concentrations of greenhouse gases could cause a 2 degree warming by 2100. In a present beset by breast cancer, poverty, and mental illness, I really don’t care about warmer winters in a richer world 100 years from now, but that’s beside the point.

More to the point, I think climate models are bunk. Specifically, I doubt a mathmatician's ability to mimic the myriad interactions between the abiotic and biotic that drive the earth’s climate system, using numbers and equations. Then again, I am not a scientist, so it doesn’t really matter what I think about models that I don’t understand.

Roger Pielke Jr, however, is a scientist. And over at his blog, Prometheus, he is making some global climate modelers look silly. In yesterday’s post, Pielke commented on a new study in the journal Nature, which suggests that Antarctica is in fact warming, whereas before the icy continent was thought to be cooling.

In the post, which is available here, Pielke juxtaposes an earlier claim on a prominent alarmist science blog that Antarctic cooling was consistent with global warming with the claim that Antarctic warming is consistent with global warming made by the authors of the Nature paper.

Asks Pielke:

“So a warming Antarctica and a cooling Antarctica are both "consistent with" model projections of global warming. Our foray into the tortured logic of "consistent with" in climate science raises the periennel question, what observations of the climate system would be inconsistent with the model predictions?”